On September 28, KEYC-TV reported in Keeping Track And Staying Involved With Stimulus Funding:
This highway project in St. Peter is an obvious indicator of the stimulus money at work. But finding out how the rest of the money is being spent around the state is not so clear...Tom Steward says, "Coming from Washington and being that much distance between us and the people making the decisions. Who do you go to to get those answers. Where do you turn to find out the plan, if any, specifically for one county over another. And I think that's the problem we see with the stimulus to this point."
The article doesn't mention Steward's institutional affiliation (I assume it was provided in a caption in the broadcast), but he's the Investigative Director of the Freedom Foundation of Minnesota's Government Transparency Team.
The Freedom Foundation self-describes as:
an independent, non-profit educational and research organization that actively advocates the principles of individual freedom, personal responsibility, economic freedom, and limited government.
Its board includes such Republican stalwarts as Annette Meeks and RNC member Brian Sullivan.
Congressman Walz, a DFLer, agreed with Steward about the need for improved tracking of the stimulus dollars.
The Mankato Free Press took a slightly different approach in Mega projects tilt stimulus spending,
This week, the Winona Daily News published a more in-depth investigation into the use of stimulus funds in Southeastern Minnesota, WHERE IS THE STIMULUS? Winona area gets more than $20 million, but dollars remain tough to track.
Mark Sommerhauser and Dustin Kass discovered:
The recently remodeled tavern got a $120,000 business loan funded by the $787 billion American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, better known as the federal stimulus bill.
When the measure [American Recovery and Reinvestment Act] passed in February, President Barack Obama and other supporters vowed unprecedented steps to make spending transparent. That included creating a Web site, recovery.gov, to track stimulus spending. The Hei and Low Tap money is listed there.
But a Winona Daily News investigation of local stimulus dollars has uncovered $11.4 million inWinona County projects not accounted for on the federal Web site, including $7.5 million for road construction, $2.1 million for the Winona Area Public Schools and $386,210 to the county.
Some of the projects appear in other sources, such as a state Web site to track stimulus money and Web sites and databases of agencies that received federal dollars.
No agency - state or federal - maintains a comprehensive publicly accessible list of stimulus projects.
Walz is pressing the White House on full transparency, but there's also a stumbling block at the state level, the WDN reports:
Part of the difficulty in tracking money at the state site is in part because state departments tasked with administering the money are not well connected, and there is no central state clearinghouse to oversee the allocations, said Curt Yoakum, communications director of the Minnesota Office of Management and Budget, which manages the state Web site.
The Minnesota site should be updated later this month when states report to the federal government on their use of the stimulus funding. The feds will post that data at recovery.gov by Oct. 30, Yoakum said.
Read the rest of the report. It's fascinating. I'm curious how many jobs were created and how may saved by the infusion of $20 million into the local economy. Will the data that the state is requiored to report to the federal government be publicized in Minnesota?
Will citizens have a chance to learn how the federal and state government have been spending our dollars?
MPR also notes support for more transparent in Walz, McCollum want proposed legislation posted online.
Other other news, John Kline, Jim Oberstar, Collin Peterson andTim Walz called for another kind of pork to aid struggling hog farmers in their districts. MPR reports in Walz, colleagues seek help for pork producers:
Since September 2007, U.S. pork producers have lost more than $4 billion in equity due to high input costs and the worldwide recession, according to the letter.
The crisis worsened in August of this year due to the H1N1 flu breakout which was frequently referred to as swine flu, giving Americans the false impression that eating pork increased their risk of getting the disease, the letter said.
Pork Magazine reports that "Al Franken (D-Minn.) and Richard Burr (R-N.C.) in the Senate and by Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and Steve King (R-Iowa) in the House" led efforts to secure the aid to farmers treading water during the second year of an economic crisis in their industry.
Walz also is pushing for a quicker passage of a new transportation bill, the Rochester Post Bulletin reports in Walz calls for work on transportation bill:
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